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In a world where faith in institutions is rapidly evaporating, great trust is placed in our hands: in the symbols of the red cross and red crescent and in the neutral, impartial, independent humanitarian action that brings them to life. We can never forget that the trust given to us is our license to operate. The Movement has an incredible capacity to be a powerful force in the world, to save lives, to change lives. But its potential is drastically untapped. It is, as others have described a 'Sleeping Giant'.

The leaders of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement will gather next week in Antalya, Turkey, for a series of meetings that will shape the future of the world's largest humanitarian movement.The Statutory Meetings of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement will bring together all 190 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, along with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

To mark the 100th anniversary of the First World War, the Review asked historians, legal scholars and humanitarian practitioners to look back at the wars of the past century from a humanitarian point of view. In using what we know of the past to illuminate the present and the future, this issue of the Review adopts a long-term perspective, with the aim to illustrate the changing face of conflict by placing human suffering ‒ so often relegated to the backdrop of history ‒ front and center. It focuses on WWI and the period immediately leading up to it as a turning point in the history of armed conflict, drawing important parallels between the past and the changes we are witnessing today.

The Battle of the Dardanelles is one of the key episodes of World War I on the Ottoman front between the British, the French, the Australians and New Zealanders on the one side, and the Ottoman army under German command on the other. Immediately after the Great War, the former belligerents engaged in another war, which protracts up until the present day: allegations of violations of the rules of war are mutually addressed, in order to become a salient element of political propaganda.

A selection of our publications in Turkish, to be dowloaded (PDF).

Humanitarian aid has today been successfully delivered into north-east Syria, in an operation jointly organized by the Turkish Red Crescent Society (TRCS), the Syrian Arab Red Crescent Society (SARC) and the ICRC. Two thousand food parcels were brought into Syria to be distributed to displaced people and civilians in Al-Hassake Governorate. Carried in two trucks, they were delivered to the border between the Turkish city of Nusaybin and the city of Qamishli in Syria. Before proceeding into Syria, the parcels were transferred from the TRCS’s trucks to trucks provided by the SARC.

International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Well over one third of Syria's pre-conflict population of 22 million is living in hard to reach and besieged areas or has sought refuge elsewhere in Syria.

Sarah Epprecht, head of the ICRC delegation in Armenia, reflects on the tragic loss of countless Armenian lives under Ottoman rule a century ago. 2015 is the centennial of what is conventionally held to be the starting date of those terrible events.